CardMunch for iPhone Converts Your Business Cards Into Contacts — By Hand

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In the past, I’ve written pretty extensively about my disdain for business cards — they add to clutter, and when you actually need to look up someone’s contact information, it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack. Alas, they’re still here, but fortunately plenty of startups are working to make them better. Today sees the launch of CardMunch, an iPhone app that lets you take a snapshot of a business card and have it added to your iPhone contacts. The application is $2.99 and comes with 10 credits (it costs one credit per card entered). Beyond that, it costs around 25 cents per card.

This isn’t a new idea — we recently wrote about the similar ScanBizCards, and there are plenty of other competitors. The difference here is that CardMunch is actually having humans verify every card that’s submitted through their system — you’re sending each photo you upload to someone on Mechanical Turk, who converts it by hand, not through optical character recognition. Given how important it can be to make sure this contact information is accurate (a wrong digit in a telephone number or email address will render them useless), this could actually prove quite useful.

25 cents may sound a bit steep, but it’s only a little more expensive than Shoeboxed’s low volume plan, which works out to around 20 cents per business card (if you are scanning hundreds of cards, though, it drops to 10 cents per card).